Chinese Internet security center reveals overseas attacks

BEIJING, Feb. 7 (Xinhua) -- China itself is a sufferer of severe Internet hacking rather than the source of such attacks that Western media has portrayed them as being, said a Chinese Internet security center on Thursday.

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal last week reported that their computer systems had been breached by China-based hackers, while China has been regularly characterized as a major origin of web threats in the United States.

In fact, weak security awareness and wild hacking activities from overseas have made Chinese Internet users victims of cyber crime, the National Computer Network Emergency Response Coordination Center (CNCERT) said in a statement.

One of the attacks sees overseas hackers control computers in China via Trojan or Botnet. CNCERT statistics show that a total of 73,286 overseas IPs were involved in hijacking nearly 14.2 million mainframes in China in this form last year. Of the victim mainframes, 10.5 million, or 74 percent, were under control by servers in the United States.

Hacker IPs from the Republic of Korea and Germany also respectively controlled nearly 785,000 and 778,000 mainframe IPs in China, according to the CNCERT.

The second form of attack involves spreading malicious codes by domain names registered overseas. The CNCERT said it found that a monthly average of 65.5 percent of the malicious domain names were registered overseas in 2012.

The third concerns attacks on websites in China from overseas. In the United States, 7,370 IPs controlled 10,037 websites in the Chinese mainland, making the United States the biggest attacker of China's Internet.